Weather 
A United States district court has temporarily stayed the execution of Christa Pike, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, just hours before she was scheduled to receive a lethal injection on Wednesday.
Although the execution has been halted, it could still proceed later Wednesday, as the state intends to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to vacate the last-minute district court order, an attorney for Pike said. If it does happen, Pike would become the only woman executed in the state in the last 200 years.
“I am not afraid to die. I’m only nervous about the process,” wrote Pike, in a letter she penned before Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee denied her clemency petition on Monday, clearing the way for her execution to take place.
Thanking those who rallied for the governor to intervene and halt the plan, Pike said she was “at peace,” regardless of the outcome of her bid. CBS News obtained a copy of the letter from her spiritual adviser, Rev. Mikey Noechel, along with a copy of another note Noechel received from Pike that contained handwritten lines from the poem “To ——” by Edgar Allan Poe. Noechel said he received the poem on Sunday and the letter on Monday.
Now 50, Pike has been incarcerated since 1995 for the murder that year of her former classmate, Colleen Slemmer. According to court records, Pike and Slemmer were students at the Job Corps Center in Knoxville when Pike, then 18, tortured and killed her, allegedly over comments Slemmer, 19, had made about her relationship.
Pike’s boyfriend and another friend helped carry out the attack and murder, the records said.
Pike’s case has drawn international attention and some outcry, with the United Nations recently joining local advocacy groups in their calls for Lee to commute her death sentence.
Their criticisms mainly center on the childhood abuse and untreated mental illness from which Pike suffered when Slemmer was killed, factors that play much larger roles in how juries make sentencing decisions now than they did at Pike’s trial. U.N. experts also said the decades Pike spent in isolation on death row, as the sole woman awaiting execution in Tennessee, should amount to unlawful torture.
Once Lee announced the clemency bid had been rejected, Pike’s attorneys issued a statement saying they were “deeply saddened and heartbroken” by the news. In it, they noted how much their client had changed while incarcerated.
“The 18-year-old girl suffering from severe mental illness and near-debilitating trauma no longer exists,” the statement said. “Christa is a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions, receives proper treatment for her mental illness, and provides for and guides fellow incarcerated women.”
One of her attorneys, Luke Ihnen, told CBS News that “in her classic Christa way, she has spent her last days worried more about her friends, family and legal team than herself.”
Rev. Mikey Noechel 
In a statement included with her clemency petition, Pike said she recognized that the ramifications of her crime have been “huge, unforgettable and ruined countless lives.”
“It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected,” she said. “I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.”
The murder conviction
Prosecutors and jurors in Pike’s initial criminal case, as well as the judges who presided over that trial and her numerous appeals, have often described Slemmer’s murder as brutal and horrific. Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, told the Knoxville News-Sentinel after Pike’s conviction in 1996 that she believed Pike was “evil,” and the state “should kill her right away.”
Records from Pike’s trial show that Slemmer was repeatedly beaten and cut with both a meat cleaver and box cutter over the course of 30 minutes or an hour, in a wooded section of the University of Tennessee’s campus.
When her body was found, a piece of the skull was missing and pentagrams had been carved into her forehead and chest, details that fueled a media firestorm and coincided with the “Satanic Panic” that swept the country in the ’80s and ’90s. Fellow students said Pike later bragged about the killing, revealing to one that she had removed and kept the missing piece of Slemmer’s skull as a “souvenir.”
Pike’s boyfriend at the time of the killing, Tadaryl Shipp, and her friend, Shadolla Peterson, both helped her carry out Slemmer’s murder, according to court records. Because Shipp was 17 at the time, he wasn’t eligible for the death penalty and, instead, received a lifetime prison sentence. His parole was denied last year, but the case will be up for review again toward the end of 2031. Peterson faced probation, exclusively, in the wake of the murder after testifying against Pike at her trial.
Teen sentencing debate
Although Pike confessed to the crime, her legal team has filed numerous appeals challenging her death sentence and questioning whether she would still receive it if her case were tried today.
When Pike received her sentence at 20, in 1996, she was the youngest woman sent to death row in the United States’ modern era of capital punishment. Now, she would be the only U.S. inmate put to death since that era began who was 18, 19 or 20 when their crimes were committed, if Wednesday’s execution goes ahead. It would also mark Tennessee’s first execution of a woman since at least 1820, according to research on the death penalty in early America.
Her attorneys have said Pike’s history of childhood sexual abuse, abandonment and neglect, as well as psychological conditions including PTSD, bipolar disorder and congenital brain damage, were not adequately represented in her original trial. They have also highlighted that, had Pike been just months younger at the time of the murder, she would not have been eligible to face capital punishment in Tennessee.
“In sentencing Pike to death, we rule out the possibility that her crime was a product of the immature mind of youth rather than fixed depravity,” wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Jane Stranch in a concurring opinion on one of Pike’s unsuccessful appeals in 2018. Despite siding with the majority’s rule against her, Stranch acknowledged the controversy around Pike’s death sentence, writing that “we presume that she is incapable of reform even though the stories of other teenage killers, many of whom have been rehabilitated behind bars, reveal other possibilities.”
Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told CBS News last year that declining national support for capital punishment and the low rates of death sentences handed down to teenagers suggest Pike would have received a different sentence in contemporary times.
“Society’s view of who is truly deserving of a death sentence has changed in the years since Christa Pike was sentenced,” Maher said. “Her young age, mental illness, and the physical and mental abuse she suffered at the time of her crime would likely persuade a jury today she is not someone who should receive a death sentence.”
Incarceration in solitude
Women rarely receive death sentences in the U.S. and make up just 1% of death row inmates nationwide. Of around 2,000 people currently set to be executed around the country, just 45 are women, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which publishes data on capital punishment but doesn’t take a position on it. Seventeen of those women have been sentenced to death in California, which has a moratorium on executions and hasn’t carried one out in more than 20 years.
Throughout most of Pike’s time in prison, she wasn’t allowed to interact with other people. Among the lawsuits that her attorneys have filed, alongside their appeals, was one in which they likened her incarceration to solitary confinement because she was the only woman on Tennessee’s death row for all but three of the years she spent behind bars. Another woman, Gaile Owens, was held in the same facility as Pike for those three years before her death sentence was ultimately commuted, but the two never had contact, court filings show.
Arguing that decades of isolation violated Pike’s constitutional rights, the lawsuit ended in a settlement with the state in 2024 that granted her more opportunities to interact with other inmates.
As her execution date approached, Pike was returned to solitary confinement, which Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol requires for 14 days prior to an execution, her lawyers said in their final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. That appeal was denied on Tuesday.
